


Five Things Clint Barton Loves, and One Thing He’s Learning to Give Up

by luthorienne



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Clint Needs a Hug, M/M, hints of childhood abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-30 05:41:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1014813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luthorienne/pseuds/luthorienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Our present is shaped by our past.  Clint's past, and some ways it has shaped him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things Clint Barton Loves, and One Thing He’s Learning to Give Up

1\. Clint Barton loves animals, and animals generally seem to love him back, or at least to trust him. In one of his foster homes, mice had made a nest in the insulation behind the furnace. When Clint couldn’t sleep, late at night, he would coax them out of their hiding places in the darkness, holding them on his upturned palms, marveling at their shiny black eyes and their warm little feet. They were his secret friends; he never told Barney, who would have chased them away and might even have killed them. He had made friends with a stray dog once, and Barney had thrown stones at it. When he worked in the circus, he and Barney had been tasked with cleaning the tiger cage. Barney was afraid of the tiger, an old female named Indira, so most of the work fell to Clint. He and Indira had bonded, and when she finally died, he grieved so terribly that Mr. Carson, who owned the circus, and Mr. Stanley, Indira’s keeper, had felt badly enough to treat Clint to a burger, a milkshake and a movie in the little Kansas town where the circus had stopped. Conscious of the honor of this concession to his feelings, Clint had dutifully eaten his meal and stared at the screen during the movie, but when the Avengers choose Blade Runner for movie night, he slips away to the roof and sits staring out across the city, thinking of jungles and the mingled smells of cat and sawdust and the slide of muscle under thick fur, warm and alive, under his palm. Later, when Tony comes up to ask him why he left, he says, simply, “I’ve seen it before.”

2\. Clint Barton loves to read. From the second he discovered the public library at the age of six, he was fascinated by the books with their bright pictures and their capacity to transport him to magical places; he grasped reading fiercely, as if it was the key to a secret cache of wonders. Barney, never much interested in reading, jeered at him for it, and occasionally destroyed his books if he caught Clint reading. Mr. Carson thought it was a better way for Clint to spend his time than drinking with the roustabouts, so if Clint’s work was done, he sometimes let Clint come into the office wagon, where he could sit with a book, hidden in the kneehole under the scarred old oak desk, or behind the sagging green couch. Mr. Carson helped him learn cursive writing with a sputtery old ballpoint pen on the backs of discarded posters and envelopes that had contained bills, saying that maybe one day Clint could write his own books, and Mr. Carson’s girlfriend, Frieda, taught him how to do arithmetic. She encouraged him to save a little bit of his money every payday in a coffee can Mr. Carson kept for him in the office wagon. He liked math, the way all the numbers fitted together so perfectly, but nothing ever was better than books and the wonderful worlds inside them – until he discovered his bow. Later, when target practice cut into Clint’s reading time, he sacrificed sleep to indulge his love of books, and there is always a battered paperback of some kind in the bottom of Clint’s go-bag. When Tony is concussed after a mission, and keeps trying to get out of bed because he’s bored and more than a little confused, Clint reads him _Stranger In A Strange Land_ , sipping from a glass of ice water from time to time as his throat goes dry. Later, when Tony thinks of the story, he sees Valentine Michael Smith’s big, capable hands holding a paperback book in a puddle of yellow light, muscular forearms flexing as he turns the pages, and he hears Jubal Harshaw’s husky baritone rising and falling in the dim and quiet room.

3\. Clint Barton is as fastidious as a cat about his person. His parents didn’t care so much about washing him when he was little, and when he was in the first grade, his teacher once sent him home because she said he smelled bad. Sometimes he still wakes up, writhing with humiliation over that. Barney had laughed and called him Stinko. Growing up, things like baths and soap and clean clothes were often hard to come by, and his work, pretty much all his life, has involved sweat and grime and grease and occasionally much worse things. He’s not afraid to get dirty when it’s necessary and he never hesitates to plunge into a situation that’s going to end, he just knows it, with him covered in grime. Or slime. But the smell of clean laundry is one of his favourite things, and almost the first thing he does when he returns from a mission is to strip off his soiled clothing and step into the shower. He revels in Stark Towers’ apparently-limitless supply of hot water, and JARVIS makes enormous, thick bath sheets of sage-green Egyptian cotton appear in his bathroom on a regular basis, along with the roughly-cut square brown blocks of sandalwood-scented soap he likes. Tony keeps a block of it in his own bathroom – not for washing; he uses a liquid soap scented with TS, the signature cologne Stark Industries will be marketing this Christmas – but just because he likes the smell.

4\. Clint Barton loves to cook. It began because he simply hates to be hungry, and he was hungry a great deal as a child. There was often no food in his parents’ home, though booze was always plentiful. Foster homes and the orphanage often kept locks on refrigerator and cupboard doors – there’s no profit to be had keeping brats who eat you out of house and home. Sometimes he and Barney stole food from people’s gardens. Clint can still remember the sharp sweetness of carrots straight from the earth, hastily wiped on the grass or on a shirt-tail, eaten in their entirety, from the thinnest roots to the very base of the green top. In the circus, at first he and Barney were fed randomly by whoever had extra food, and if no-one had extra food, they sometimes went hungry. Later, Barney started hanging out with the roustabouts and their girlfriends, and they usually shared food with him. But Clint made himself useful around the cook tents, and Madame Zoltar taught him to make goulash one rainy afternoon, the red paprika almost glowing with heat, the savoury smells of onions and meat making his mouth water like a dog’s. Madame Zoltar, whose real name was Mrs. Horvath, taught him how to stuff a chicken with whole onions and red and green peppers, and to rub the bumpy skin with salt and pepper and more of the fragrant red spice before sealing it in a dutch oven to bake in the fire. She taught him to take the little blue egg-shaped plums they sometimes picked from trees by the roadside, to split them in half and take the stones out, and to fill the cavities with sugar and cinnamon cadged from the doughnut vendor, wrap them in dough and bake them in the residual heat on the campfire stones. After Madame Zoltar joined the troupe, Clint wasn’t hungry so much anymore. When he left the circus to join the Marines, she kissed his cheek and put a piece of paper in his shirt pocket with some of her recipes on it. He picked up some more when he was posted overseas, and even though he almost always ate in the mess, he kept collecting good recipes. Sometimes he sent them to Madame Zoltar so she could try them, until his letters started to come back marked “Addressee Unknown”. When he got his first apartment, he bought pots and spices and all kinds of food, and if it wasn’t for how hard he worked and trained, he’d probably have gotten fat. Once, he and Phil were stuck in a safe house in Hungary in the middle of winter with almost no heat. Phil was chilled and feverish, and Clint slipped out into the market, his Hungarian good enough to pass, and bought meat and onions and spices, and rice to eat it with. Phil said it saved him from pneumonia, and Clint told him about Madame Zoltar and the chicken and the dutch oven. Now, the Avengers take turns cooking in the communal kitchen where they all tend to gather for dinner. There’s a big tin of paprika in the cupboard, and JARVIS makes sure there’s always sugar and onions and red and green peppers and tender beef and cinnamon and rice. When it’s Clint’s turn to cook, Tony comes up early from the workshop to lean on the counter, getting in Clint’s way and asking questions and tasting this and that, until Clint takes him by the shoulders and makes him sit at the breakfast bar with a paring knife, taking the stones out of little blue plums. 

5\. Clint Barton loves clothes. He’s no fashion plate, but the process of going into a store and picking out something brand-new that’s just for him makes him feel safe, somehow. When his parents were alive, he mostly wore Barney’s outgrown clothes, and after, in the foster homes and the orphanage, he wore hand-me-downs from people he’d never met. In the circus, too, except for his costumes, which Frieda and Madame Zoltar and Trick Shot made for him. There were three, because he kept growing, and the first two had been taken apart and the bits passed on to someone else after he couldn’t wear them anymore, but he’d kept the last one, all purple polyester and spangles, too small for him now (he’d kept growing after he went into the Marines, and he’d put on a lot of muscle, too), but folded away with a cedar block and some mint leaves (to discourage mice, not that JARVIS would let mice live in the Tower) in an old kitbag in the back of his closet. He takes care of his clothes, sewing on buttons and repairing ripped seams, the way Frieda taught him. The Marines and SHIELD had provided his uniforms, but he’d bought his civilian clothes himself, going through racks of shirts and jeans, picking out t-shirts and sweaters and underwear, trying things on to see what he liked best. He likes blues and grays and black, and purple as a kind of homage to his circus costume. He buys real wool sweaters and even some silk underwear (it’s really warm, and sometimes he has to spend a long time out in the cold, waiting to take a shot) because he can afford the dry-cleaning now, and he even has a couple of nice suits. Tony measures him carefully for his Avengers uniform and spends a long time working on some miracle fabric that moves with him like his own skin and helps cushion him from bumps and scratches, and he gets mad when Clint insists that sleeves interfere with his draw, but he listens and Clint thinks the new uniform is a lot better than the old one, the one that SHIELD made for him. Tony buys him a midnight blue bathrobe, thick, warm velour like fur, that reaches to the floor and has sleeves so long Clint has to roll them up into cuffs. Tony says it’s revenge for making him take the sleeves off Clint’s uniform, so Clint starts calling it the Big Blue Robe of Revenge. He likes it, though, and sometimes he wears it to movie nights, and Tony sits next to him on the floor, leaning up against Clint’s shoulder, sticking his fingers into the cuffs and muttering darkly about sleeves.

6\. Clint Barton loves Phil Coulson. He loves his mind, his body, the way he always seems to get Clint. He’d always felt safe with Phil, even when the ops were going to shit and the WSC had its collective head even farther than usual up its ass. Phil was never scared of him, never seemed to judge him for being who he is. But Phil had _[left him]_ gone to California with the new team, and now Sitwell was his handler. Clint’s always been good at adjusting to reality, and reality was, Phil had moved on, and he was going to have to suck it up and do likewise. He had plenty of experience at this, after all. People have been vanishing from his life forever. And it’s not as if he was alone in the world, the way he’d been when he was a kid. He had friends – Sitwell, and Woo, and the Avengers team, and even Fury, God help him – and he and Phil were still friends, just not … what they had been. Whatever that was. He’d tried to talk to Natasha about it, but she got mad at him and cussed him out in Russian, so he knows it’s hard for her, too. And then she got sent to Brazil for a long-haul op, so that discussion was over. So he hangs out with the other Avengers a lot, and when he’s at SHIELD, he hangs with Sitwell and Fury and Woo, and he’ll get back to being able to sleep through the night pretty soon, and in the meantime, he doesn’t feel like he has to smile for anyone or be cheerful or understanding when he’s up on the roof. After a week or so, Tony starts coming up to sit next to him on the roof in the dark. He stays pretty quiet, which is unusual for Tony, and it’s nice, really, not to be completely alone, and still not to have to talk. He thinks Tony maybe knows a little bit how he feels. After a few nights of it, Clint notices that sometimes Tony kind-of leans against him while they sit there, and he leans back, his shoulder against Tony’s, appreciating the unspoken support. He stares firmly at the blinking red light on the radio mast on top of the Schuler Building, and clamps his jaw tight, breathing through his nose so Tony won’t think he’s crying. And some nights, he doesn’t think he’s very successful at it, because Tony gathers up his hands and warms them and calls him Katniss and says it’s going to be okay. He hopes Tony’s right.

**Author's Note:**

> I spent some years working with children's services, dealing with children in high-risk situations. Clint clearly has remarkable strength of character, but it would be foolish to assume he hasn't been affected by the events of his childhood. I couldn't resist giving him some (albeit rough-and-tumble) good influences, to mitigate some of the bad things.


End file.
